NEW YORK – Hope and change might be in store for UCLA basketball, a team now grateful to escape Brooklyn with at least one win Tuesday night.

Hope, as freshman Shabazz Muhammad scored a game-high 21 points in his first collegiate start.

Change, as the No. 11 Bruins shifted to a zone defense, shaving a double-digit deficit in their 60-56 victory against unranked Georgia.

“Important tonight that we got the `W’ after the sting of defeat,” UCLA coach Ben Howland said. “It would have been a long plane ride to come out of New York 0-2.”

Here were the Bruins (4-1) in a must-win situation at Barclays Center, a place where they had lost to unranked Georgetown one night prior in the Legends Classic. The Hoyas, at least, were undefeated then. The Bulldogs, on the other hand, are now 1-4 after being held off by UCLA.

Win the Bruins did, albeit in less than dominant fashion. Bandied as a potential Final Four team in the preseason, the team is clearly a work in progress.

Georgia, which entered the game shooting just 36.3 percent from the field, punished the Bruins early with a series of soft layups. Nemanja Djurisic, a 6-foot-9 forward, had six of his team’s first eight points.

Down 6-0 early, UCLA’s first attempts at a comeback never stuck. The gap see-sawed – from 15-6 to 15-12, from 22-16 to 28-18 – but the Bruins struggled to seize control.

So Howland switched from a man defense to a 2-3 zone three-quarters of the way through the first half, after the Bruins went down by as many as 11 points.

The Bulldogs immediately responded with back-to-back 3-pointers, but their offense slowed considerably in the second half, down to a 30.3-percent clip.

“This is a team that probably at times will be a good zone team,” Howland said. “I want to be primarily a man team, but we’ve got to go to it once in a while, especially when we were getting scored on as easily as we were.”

The Bruins took their first lead almost four minutes after halftime on a 3-pointer by shooting guard Norman Powell. UCLA made just one other shot from behind the arc, by Muhammad.

The team helped itself at the free-throw line as well, an advantage keyed by Muhammad’s aggressive drives.

“I thought I was really getting more comfortable out there,” Muhammad said. “I was getting open on the screens and mismatches down low.”

The star freshman shot 8 of 11 from the line, bettering the Bulldogs’ combined 6-of-10 showing. UCLA made 20 of 30 free throws.

“In the gut of the game, the other team made the plays and we didn’t,” Georgia coach Mark Fox said. “It’s as simple as that. … They made plays and we did not.”

Muhammad looked more comfortable after a shaky debut off the bench against Georgetown, but his emergence in the offense took shots away elsewhere – a symptom of a system that can’t fully feed its many mouths.

Jordan Adams didn’t score his first field goal until there was 3:45 left, finishing with four points. Adams was the first UCLA freshman to open his career with four straight 20-point games, and the first player of any year to do it since Don MacLean in the 1990-91 season.

Kyle Anderson, who went scoreless Monday, chipped in nine points, nine rebounds and three assists. Travis Wear, whose brother David sat out with a sore back, was UCLA’s second double-digit scorer with 10 points and eight rebounds.

Jack Wang covers the Chargers, the latest NFL team to relocate to Los Angeles. He previously covered the Rams, and also spent four years on the UCLA beat, a strange period in which the Bruins' football program often outpaced their basketball team. He is a proud graduate of UC Berkeley, where he spent most of his time in The Daily Californian offices in Eshleman Hall — a building that did not become earthquake-safe until after his time on campus.